money is there to be made here in any other way? I shall inquire about him.'
We dropped in at the Cromarty Arms, and asked good Mrs. M'Lachlan if she could tell us anything about the gentlemanly stranger. Mrs. M'Lachlan replied that he was from London, she believed, a pleasant gentleman enough; and he had his wife with him.
'Ha! Young? Pretty?' Charles inquired, with a speaking glance at me.
'Weel, Sir Charles, she'll no be exactly what you'd be ca'ing a bonny lass,' Mrs. M'Lachlan replied; 'but she's a guid body for a' that, an' a fine braw woman.'
'Just what I should expect,' Charles murmured, 'He varies the programme. The fellow has tried White Heather as the parson's wife, and as Madame Picardet, and as squinting little Mrs. Granton, and as Medhurst's accomplice; and now, he has almost exhausted the possibilities of a disguise for a really young and pretty woman; so he's playing her off at last as the riper product—a handsome matron. Clever, extremely clever; but—we begin to see through him.' And he chuckled to himself quietly.
Next day, on the hillside, we came upon our stranger again, occupied as before in peering into the rocks, and sounding them with a hammer. Charles nudged me and whispered, 'I have it this time. He's posing as a geologist.'
I took a good look at the man. By now, of
